Boku no Hero Academia – 58

「特別編・愛で地球を救え!」 (Tokubetsu-hen・Ai de Chikyuu o Sukue!)
“Special Episode: Save the World with Love!”

This episode is a special anime-original episode, aired because there’s a big charity event going on in Japan at the moment, and it was either get a special one-off episode or nothing at all. I’m glad the HeroAca team decided to give us something, because this turned out to be a fun little episode! Not vital by any means, but it was fun, and it doesn’t break anything, which is appreciated.

The conceit is that 1-A is undergoing special training, this time in a small group featuring most of its main-est characters. I appreciate how they took the murder (eventually deemed suicide, then revealed to be a ploy) of the villain seriously, because if someone else had murdered him, that would be a crime worth investigating. It doesn’t matter that he was a criminal himself, if someone committed a bigger crime (murder), they need to be captured and questioned—even if it had been revealed that it was self-defense. Which it wasn’t, the scenario was quite tight and fun to watch. And the teachers were great actors too! I got a good chuckle out of that, especially when all the love stuff turned out to be a total lie, haha!

In the end though, this was mostly a promo for the movie, out in Japan and this week being released in some theaters in the US, I believe! This episode was a bit silly, but it was fun, and since it was in lieu of no episode, I didn’t feel like it wasted our time. There are worse uses of half an hour, certainly.

So this ep did both what I wanted and DIDN’T want to see. I didn’t want to see them take two characters and just have them talk to the audience behind a desk, which they did, but those moments lasted a minute total, and they had nothing to do with the main plot, which was a handful of “randomly”-assigned characters, IE the most popular ones in the show, partaking in a forensics test. This mystery was a good break from the usual “punch him into the ground” action we usually get in this show, and offered a ton of great moments from Midnight, who proved to be an excellent actor, and more of Buff All Might, who I already miss terribly.

Also this ep served as a light prologue to the movie Two Heroes, which coincidentally is going to be released in theaters in the United States of Smash in September for a limited run! I wonder if this means Funimation will get Erica Mendez and Ray Chase to reprise their roles in the series too when it comes to dubbing this?? It would mean LA actors will get to appear in a Funimation series!

:D Loved the ending too. They used faking death as one of the points that factors into the test! Very clever.

I loved the flashback to All Might and Partner in a vehicle which reminded me of the Adam West Batmobile.
I loved that the students assumed that All Might was just being a poor actor and thus failed when if they had secured the live villain they would have succeeded. Reminds me of US Army training where I and many started decalaring obvious facts to ensure the instructors would not dock us for missing them.